Adam walked the streets again. There were fewer people in the city now, and those like Adam, with no piece of their bodies missing, were rarer still. For a whole morning not another living soul walked the streets besides Adam; they lay numb wherever they could rest, quietly waiting to die and then to become someone else's rations.
In the afternoon the strong, having recovered a little strength, went foraging again. This time many of them set their sights on Adam. He drove them off, and still he did not choose to kill—he only watched coldly while they slaughtered one another.
When night came, the exact same scene played out again: the assault on the city, the Mage, the evil magic—and then dawn.
The cycle ran six times. Adam's hunger grew sharper and sharper, and dodging the soldiers who came to seize people grew harder and harder.
A delusion took root in Adam's heart: if he was not chosen next time either, if he still did not die of it, then he would be able to break free of this illusion. The feeling grew from the moment it appeared, until he believed it in spite of himself.
On the seventh day the soldiers came to Adam, roughly bound his hands with rope, and drove him out of the city at sword and spear point.
Adam was too weak; that weakness had stripped him of any power to resist, and he could only let the soldiers take him.
Along with the rest of the commoners, Adam was strung into a human wall outside the city, and beneath the fangs and claws and magic of the magical beasts the slaughter was terrible. Then the Mage appeared for the seventh time, and this time the ancient magic blew the commoners—Adam among them—to pieces.
"So this is how I die?" Adam heaved a long sigh.
But in the very next instant he sensed something was wrong. If he were already dead, how could he still be having thoughts?
Sure enough, the next second the illusion shattered into fragments. Every scene of those seven days flashed again through Adam's mind at speed, and then reassembled.
Adam was back at the beginning: still that broken city, still clothes that could not cover his body, still ground covered with numb, unfeeling people.
Adam's deliberate surrender of reason grew worse and worse, and it blanked his consciousness. He had no concept of instinct; if one had to name an instinct in him, it was survival. But survival was of no use in this illusion, because Adam had no power at all to command his own life.
So another cycle began. Nothing changed: people like beasts, soldiers like animals, Mages so cold they were no longer human—and death again on the seventh day.
After who knew how many cycles, all that was left of Adam was the last shred of reason that psychokinesis sustained, and that reason kept him from killing, from eating human flesh, from resisting.
It was not that Adam had any moral line in his heart. He simply felt that if he did as the despair monster wished, he might sink into a state beyond all redemption.
When the identical ending had repeated several hundred times, Adam suddenly understood.
Since he wanted to observe despair and then to experience it, since he had skipped theory and gone straight to the clinical stage with himself as the test subject, to keep holding on to his reason like this was plainly stupid. He knew he had to change.
Nothing is gained without a price. Adam had walked into the illusion of his own accord, gambling with the despair monster and gambling with the Soul Rend spell, and the stake was his life. This was the all-in gamble he had started himself, a hand he could only win by burning his boats; he had to follow the enemy's rhythm, or he was certain to lose. To still be hoarding his hole card now was stupidity.
Adam cast his reason away.
Someone asked, "What are you doing?"
The man came crawling over the ground toward Adam, words spilling out of him in broken fragments: "Hungry, hungry, eat, eat..."
"Get up. I'll take you to find something to eat." Adam helped him to his feet and said it softly.
The man had never imagined he could hear such words. He let himself be helped up, dazed, and stared at Adam, dazed. "Food? Food!"
"Yes. Food." Adam nodded to him seriously, then called out to the several people hiding behind the wall, "Come out, all of you. I'll take you to find food as well."
This must be what it felt like to stand up on high ground, raise a shout and lift an arm. In despair people's hearts were full of numbness and bewilderment, and then a light appeared; small as that light's power was, it was enough to warm a heart.
Nearly ten emaciated men walked the streets behind Adam. Copying him, they persuaded every person lying on the ground, every person in the midst of violence or about to commit it: "Stop. Come with us. We'll all go find food together."
So the crowd grew larger. Whether doubting, utterly convinced, or simply full of hope, they followed behind Adam, pulling down everything that could be stuffed into a mouth from wall corners, from cracks in the stone, from every nook a hand could reach, and gathering together to wait for the division.
Of course some did not believe. They viciously stopped the persuaders and tried to kill them, but the crowd Adam had gathered was too large, and their ferocity could no longer frighten anyone. Adam, however, stopped his so-called companions from killing; he let those who did not believe walk away.
With no weaklings left to prey on and no source of food, that group began killing one another. Some got food, some died in the fighting, and at last the food ran out and they had no choice but to join Adam's ranks.
Adam gathered all the commoners in the city and collected every scrap of food that could be collected. He ordered them to cook it and divide it evenly among everyone. As for whether something that crossed every line of human decency had been mixed into the food, he had no time to bother about it.
Night fell.
The soldiers, who had vanished without a trace by day, appeared once more. They paid the gathered crowd no mind at all and drove them along as roughly as before—but this time there was a voice of resistance in the crowd.
"You can't do this. We're bare-handed—we're no match for the magical beasts at all. You're soldiers, so why won't you protect us? Why doesn't the great Mage strike out himself and drive the beasts back?" someone called out loudly.
The man stepped out of the crowd, and the many companions behind him gave him boundless courage. He said, "Soldier, I think we need to talk. We have no way to hold off the magical beasts, so why—"
The soldier facing him looked at him with a savage face, raised the long saber in his hand and struck him across the face with the flat of the blade. "Lowborn scum, who gave you leave to speak that way to a descendant of knights? You scum live in the city like parasites, enjoying the rule and protection of the nobility—so shouldn't you now be contributing your own strength?"
Adam stepped out of the ranks, looked at the companions around him with compassion, and said to the soldier, "I request an audience with the great Mage. I request the rights that are my due."
The soldiers stared at Adam, dumbfounded, then roared with laughter, laughing until tears and snot ran down their faces. "Hahahaha, what am I hearing? A lowborn wretch wants to go see the noble, the great Mage! Hahaha, you filthy, low-born mongrels—what gives you the right?"
Adam's eyes were still full of compassion. He waited quietly for the soldiers to finish laughing and meant to keep persuading them, but before he could speak again the soldier's face changed abruptly. "I'll say it once. Now. Get outside the city at once, or else—" He swept up his long saber and split the body of the commoner who had spoken first from top to bottom, then said cruelly, "you all die."
The crowd began to stir; they fell back behind Adam one after another, looking at him with hope in their eyes. Adam spoke: "No. You cannot do this. We have the same right to live—"
"Kill them!"
The soldier bellowed, raised saber and spear, and began the slaughter of his own kind.
The commoners could not resist at all. Screaming, they fled, then begged without cease for mercy. Adam stood where he was without moving, his eyes still full of compassion, still trying to persuade the soldiers—until a soldier smashed him to the ground with the shaft of a spear. "So you're their leader? You're going to regret what you've done."
Blood flowed in rivers, and the soldiers showed no mercy whatsoever. Then suddenly a voice came from the crowd: "Don't kill me! I'm willing to go outside the city—I was bewitched, it was him, it was all his idea!" The soldiers stopped the killing and watched as the man pointed at Adam, screaming himself hoarse.
The crowd was silent for a moment, and then they all caught on: they piled every fault onto Adam. To prove they were in their right minds, they rushed forward and rained punches and kicks on Adam where he lay, as though Adam were the devil who had lured them into depravity.
The soldiers watched this scene with satisfaction. The sergeant clapped his hands to stop the killing, then gave his orders: "Take them outside the city. As for this one, leave him here."
The crowd's hatred was stoked in an instant; they looked at Adam with disgust and malice. The soldier's intent could only be called vicious: he had set Adam against the people.
The sergeant stayed behind last. He crouched down beside Adam and said, "Want to guess what happens to you tomorrow? I hope I'll see you turn up alive in front of me again tomorrow night. Hahahaha!"
Adam lay down where he was, quietly watching the wordless night sky and listening to the sounds of slaughter beyond the walls, unable to say how he felt. He lay like that the whole night through, until the battered survivors from outside the city limped back into town. Every one of them looked at Adam with hatred and gathered around him; after a silence, someone picked up a piece of broken stone from the ground, and someone rolled up sleeves that weren't there.
"Kill him! It's all because of him that the great Mage and the noble lords abandoned us! He's a devil—kill him!" At that call, all the survivors came at Adam in a frenzy, bursting out with a strength far beyond what their bodies could bear.
Adam did not fight back. He let them attack him, let them tear at his flesh and blood.
His vital breath grew fainter and fainter, and still Adam did not move. There were no eyes left in their sockets, and yet he still gazed at the sky.
In those hollow sockets, the light dimmed.
Adam's mercy was replaced by despair.